Isidor I. Rabi (1898–1988)

Isidor Isaac Rabi, known professionally as I.I. Rabi, was born to a Jewish family in Rymanów, Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Poland). Soon after his birth, the family emigrated to the USA, and he was raised on the Lower East Side of New York City. In 1916, after graduating from high school, he entered Cornell University as an electrical engineering student, but soon switched to chemistry. Later, he became interested in physics. He continued his studies at Columbia University, where he was awarded his doctoral degree for a thesis on the magnetic susceptibility of certain crystals. In 1927, he went to Europe, where he met and worked with many of the finest physicists of the time.

He returned to the USA in 1929, when Columbia University offered him a position as lecturer in physics; he rose to became full professor in 1937. During World War II, Prof. Rabi worked on radar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Radiation Laboratory (RadLab) and on the Manhattan Project. His techniques for using nuclear magnetic resonance to discern the magnetic moment and nuclear spin of atoms earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944. Nuclear magnetic resonance became an important tool for nuclear physics and chemistry, and the subsequent development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has also made it crucial to the field of medicine.

After the war, he served on the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, and was its chairman from 1952 to 1956. He also served as a science advisor to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was involved with the establishment of the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in 1946, and later with the creation of CERN in Geneva, Switzerland in 1952. When Columbia created the rank of University Professor in 1964, Rabi was the first to receive it. Columbia also named a special chair and the most valuable undergraduate research scholarship in his honor.